Despite movement to a paperless society in which the use of paper is eliminated or greatly reduced, printed materials are still produced for various purposes. In printing, a raster image processor (RIP) is used to produce a raster image (i.e. a bitmap) of a page description in a high-level page description language. The bitmap is then sent to a printing device that, in turn, instructs a number of printheads to print the image on a print medium such as paper.
Oftentimes, however, the amount of data transferred to the printing device is so large, and the time it takes to produce a bitmap of the page description is so long, that it causes the printing device to be operated below the printer's maximum speed (e.g. in feet per minute) or starves the printing device of data altogether. For example, in commercial printing devices, once a printer or printer press starts work on a print job, hardware-ready data bits are to be made continuously available to the printer until the entire print job has completed printing. A printer or printing press starves and will be stopped or slowed when hardware-ready bits are not available. This causes the printing device to lose performance, and, in turn, causes profit for the print shop to decrease along with the decrease in production.
Throughout the drawings, identical reference numbers designate similar, but not necessarily identical, elements.